Editing Openai/6874b524-4134-8013-b5e6-0601c853d841 (section)

===== After his 1918 revolutionary pieces, Yakob spent the early 1920s in Moscow’s increasingly politicized music scene. He was a student and later a protégé of Reinhold Glière, but with his dissonant compositions, African-American rhythmic motifs, and jazz inflections, he soon stood apart from the more conservative Soviet musical establishment. =====

It was during this period that he encountered Vladimir Dukelsky, a gifted student from a noble family who shared Yakob's fascination with syncopation, American spirituals, and tonal experimentation. The two had a brief, intense friendship—playing four-hand piano arrangements in cafés near Tverskaya, arguing over Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, and dissecting the possibilities of “Soviet jazz.”

But their paths diverged sharply by 1924:
* Dukelsky, ever aware of his aristocratic pedigree and uneasy with Soviet conformity, emigrated via Constantinople to Paris, eventually reinventing himself as Vernon Duke in the United States.
* Yakob, stubborn and idealistic, chose to stay.

His 1925 work “Steel & Shadows: Suite for Dancer and Machine” premiered at the Meyerhold Theater and was hailed by avant-garde critics as “a proletarian jazz ritual.” But party officials grumbled about “Negro decadence,” “bourgeois individualism,” and “non-dialectical rhythm.”